The 2014 Atlantic Hurricane season is in full swing through November, putting your organization – and mission-critical systems, like email – at sudden risk of exposure to tropical storms, floods and fires.

Ask yourself: When was the last time you tested your business continuity plan? If the answer is one year or longer, you risk significant network downtime, data leakage and financial loss. According to Gartner, depending on your industry, network downtime can typically cost $5,600 per minute or more than $300,000 per hour, on average. Don't wait for disaster to strike. Treat email like the critical system it is, and avoid making these six mistakes that could jeopardize business continuity – and your job.

Not testing your continuity solution. You've devised and implemented what you believe to be a solid continuity solution, but you've not given it a production test. Instead, you cross your fingers and hope when (and if) the time comes, the solution works as planned. There are two major problems with not testing your plan from the start. First, things get dusty over time. It's possible the technology no longer works, or worse, maybe it was not properly configured in the first place. Plus, you might not be regularly backing up critical systems. Without testing the solution, you'll learn the hard way that data is not being entirely backed up when you perform the restore. Second, when it comes to planning, you need a clear chain of command, should disaster strike. If your network goes down, you need to know who to call, immediately. Performing testing once simply is not enough. You need to test your solution once a year, at a minimum. Depending on the tolerance of your business, you'll likely have to test more frequently, like quarterly or even monthly.

Forgetting to test fail back. Testing the failover capabilities of your continuity solution is only half the job. Are you prepared for downtime that could last hours, days or even weeks? The ability to go from the primary data center to the secondary one – then reverting back – is critical, and this needs to be tested. You need to know that data can be restored into normal systems after downtime.

Assuming you can easily engage the continuity solution. It's common to plan for “normal” disasters like power outages and hardware failure. But in the event of something more severe, like a flood or fire, you need to know how difficult it's to trigger a failover. Also, you need to know where you need to be. For example, can you trigger the fail over from your office or data center? It's critical to know where the necessary tools are located and how long it'll take you or your team to locate them. Physical access is critical. Distribute tools to multiple data centers, as well as your local environment.

Excluding policy enforcement. When an outage occurs, you must still account for regulatory and policy-based requirements that impact email communications. This includes archiving, continuity and security policies. Otherwise, you risk non-compliance.

Trusting agreed RTP and RPO. In reality, you've got to balance risk and budget. When an outage happens, will the email downtime agreed upon by the business really stick? In other words, will the CEO really be able to tolerate no access to email for two hours? And will it be acceptable for customers to be out of touch with you for one day? The cost associated with RTO and RPO could cause a gap in data restore. If you budget for a two-day email restore, be prepared that during an outage, this realistically means two days without email for the entire organization. As part of your testing methodology, you may discover that you need more or less time to back up and restore data. It's possible that, as a result, you may need to implement more resilient technology – like moving from risky tape backup to more scalable and accessible cloud storage.

Neglecting to include cloud services. Even when you implement cloud technologies to deliver key services, such as email, you still have the responsibility of planning for disruptions. Your cloud vendor will include disaster recover planning on their end to provide reliable services, but mishaps – and disasters – still happen. Mitigate this risk by stacking multi-vendor solutions wherever possible to ensure redundancy, especially for services like high availability gateways in front of cloud-based email services, or cloud backups of key data.

With the proper testing and upfront business continuity preparation, you can significantly reduce – or even prevent – email downtime, data leakage and financial loss after disaster strikes.

Want more great articles like this?Subscribe to our blog.

Get all the latest news, tips and articles delivered right to your inbox